It is difficult to put together a cohesive political theory when one is a nihilist. This is probably unsurprising. The rolling of eyes and the pained facial expressions when others speak of politics, this is easy enough. But when one gets queried oneself and the only reply one can muster is, “well … it’s complicated.” …
Certainly any form of the phrase “we hold these truths to be self evident” is a non starter.
So i scan a lot of history and i scan a lot of the social and cognitive sciences. I pull from these what i am able, but they are, alas, the least “mature” of sciences. My faith in them is small. But they are the only tools available.
Complexity is an issue in the problem itself, though, not just in the answers. That itself is a clue. Take the economy, for example. (“The economy”, a terrible start right there, it should be plural). I do not recall the source but there is a saying that the economy more closely resembles and ecosystem than it does a large machine. If one accepts this statement as likely then many important points can be derived. Most of all, one should be very cautious when trying to fix it. It can be made worse. In fact, it is possible that most tinkering not only doesn’t fix the issue at hand, but causes others. (I personally think that it is a fairly robust ecosystem, in the metaphor … rabbits introduced aren’t likely to run roughshod. )
Politics is less a machine even than economics, at least than micro economics. In micro there are at least some legitimate equations, and first and second derivatives have some concrete meanings. By the time we move on to politics, and macro economics, even those small threads are gone.
And so, to this extent, i do fit in on this blog politically. I am extremely wary of big fixes, especially the quick and easy ones. When someone complains of how much money some CEOs make or some big oil company my first instinct is not rage, but to question how that compares with other industries, and if there is a difference, to ask why that is so.
There is the story of a city planner who took over the planning job of … we’ll say London. One day his staff comes to him and says they’ve found a gate they want to remove. Its in the way and no body can conceive of why the gate is there. The planner immediately tells them they are not to touch the gate. Until they can answer that question, “why is it there?”, it should be left there. This is a famous tale and i my quick Google search was not able to track the origin. The money quote goes something like, “It wasn’t built by madmen in the middle of the night. It was built by a probably rational man for a specific reason.” That reason my well be archaic now, but it best be understood before tinkering.
“Dispersed knowledge” is another idea that i share, likely, with all the other bloggers on this site. No matter how smart and efficient is your team, making macro economic or broad political decisions in a manner that “beats the market” (so to speak) is unlikely in almost all cases. This is not a fault of the decision maker, it is a reflection of how information exists in the world … fluidly and dispersed. For any major national decision, by the time enough information is gathered and analyzed to make the decision properly, the time to make the decision is long passed.
These are two of my pillars. If government is to make positive and effective decisions, in light of these two ideas, those decisions must be micro, marginal and local.
That last word, “local”, makes for interesting discussions when the members of this blog are in one room. When the topic is local, rather than federal (or even state), some of us become far more lenient on the people’s use of their government to do things. Part of it is the converse of what i have stated above, it is more doable. The other side of the coin is the ability to exit the situation more easily (which is a more difficult topic, and for another day).
Summary: This Nihilist just does not trust that we know enough about what we are doing. When the topics can be analyzed and discussed and still timely implemented (cases which are almost always micro, marginal and local) i hold a pretty open and pragmatic mindset about what is permissible (that is, what the people have a moral right to instruct their government to do on their behalf). Though they are resilient, i fear that the political arena and the macro economy are more easily damaged by changes, than they are helped. Humans, as social creatures, got to where we are in light of evolutionary prods and a good 5000+ years of trial and error history (read: Hegel’s “slaughter bench”). We should not take lightly the good of what is in place … but obviously note, as well, that we are still far from the ideal … we are merely “workable”. Experimentation is good, including political and macro economic experimentation.
